Tech Time Warp of the Week: The Original Macintosh, 1985

It began as a televised users’ group meeting.

“In the early ’80s, when PCs were just coming out, the way you learned about computers was to meet up with a bunch of other geeks you met at the local computer store,” remembers Stewart Cheifet. “What we did was bring some of these same guys into the studio and put a live users’ group meeting on television.”

It was called Computer Chronicles, and it proved to be so popular on local television in the San Francisco Bay Area that it soon expanded into a kind of computer talk show that was syndicated across the country and eventually overseas as well. With Cheifet as its driving force and longtime host, the show ran from 1982 through the early 2000s, providing an uninterrupted document of the PC age.

With the video below, we give you one of the classics, a 1985 episode where Chiefet and crew run the rule over the Apple Macintosh, the seminal desktop machine that made its debut a year earlier.

Yes, you can see the “instant myth” in action — it prints video stills in black and white! — but you also get legendary engineer Larry Tesler, who was part of the Xerox PARC team that developed the SmallTalk platform — a major influence on the Mac — before moving to Apple in 1980. And if you stick around for the end, there’s a bonus: Bay Area waitresses using handhelds to take your dinner order. Apparently, this was the future of dining.

So much has changed since then, but just as much has stayed the same. Apple fanboys still head to Macworld every year. Pundits are still trying to decide whether or not the Mac is a business computer. And people are still saying that the machine wasn’t as innovative as everyone thought it was…